SLIDE SHOWS

More than 300 IT executives and dozens of vendors met to talk about midmarket solutions at the Midsize Enterprise Summit.

ChannelWeb picked 15 common beliefs about Microsoft and gave channel partners the opportunity to explain why they're more fiction than fact.

ChannelWeb visited Tech Data's headquarters for a strategy update and was given a behind-the-scenes tour of how the distributor operates.

FIND REVIEWS

STORAGE REVIEWS

HP has brought a new SAN solution to market, targeting the midmarket as competition heats up from rivals like Dell and EMC. The Test Center takes a look to see how HP's solution holds up.

Microsoft bills its SkyDrive online storage service as a way for co-workers to share files. The Test Center takes a look to see if that's really a good idea.

HP is placing new emphasis on storage in 2008, and it has offered a refresh to its All-in-One storage family with the new AiO 400r and AiO 400t.

CA is launching a major upgrade to its ARCserve Backup product for storage management, as it works to leverage virtualization and ROI focus in the market.

A lot of VMware implementations end up with I/O bottlenecks, overcommitments, and mismatches between resource pools. While domain-specific monitoring tools provide some insight into resources, cross-domain traffic that spans multiple virtualized tiers is completely undetectable.

Sepaton's S2100 DS2 Series 500 makes the switchover from tape backup to disk-based backup easy because the change occurs entirely on the back-end. As far as the backup software is concerned, it's still tape.

In the storage world, it's all starting to come together.

Quantum combines the advantages of hard disk drives and tape into its GoVault backup solution.

Hewlett-Packard's StorageWorks All-in-One Storage Systems, earmarked for SMBs and branch offices, make it easy for solution providers to get into disk-based network storage without having much storage expertise.

As far as PowerFile is concerned, tape just doesn't cut it for archiving files. The vendor's Active Archive Appliance (A3) instead uses DVDs for data storage, providing a long-term, more readily accessible file archive.

Iomega's new generation Of 70-Gbyte REV drives enable users to back up an entire system on a single disk -- in no time.

An emerging technology called holographic storage is expected to soon make its way into everyday life. Designed for long-term data archiving and regulatory compliance, the first generation of cartridges will hold 300 Gbytes of data.

The TrekStor USB-Stick CS-D USB thumb drive offers up to 8 Gbytes of storage for about $180, which translates into less than $23 per Gbyte.

Store-It: When portable hard drives get personal.

Quantum is addressing the backup needs of SMBs with its new GoVault removable drive storage solution.

Iomega's REV Loader 280 ensures that small businesses don't have to settle for backup hardware that lacks performance.

Buffalo has upped the ante in the network attached storage game with the TeraStation Pro.

Gateway's E-6500D looks like an old-school desktop computer yet includes state-of-the-art components, offers top-notch performance and is compatible with most modern applications and peripherals.

CRN Test Center engineers agree the Contactual OnDemand Contact Center will, in fact, reduce the costs and eliminate the risks companies face when deploying customer service automation solutions.

Ideal for SMB use, Exabyte's new VXA-172 Packet Drive will give customers the greatest ROI on their hardware investmentand solution providers will still profit by performing upgrades down the road.

UCN has recently created a set of pre-integrated contact center applications to fit the specialized needs of call centers.

With just 4U of rack space and a new chassis design, Nexsan Technologies' SATABeast storage array allows customers to save on energy consumption.

Idealstor’s FrankeNAS uses hard disks both in a RAID array and in a removable disk array, which does away with the need for tape.

Unless you live under a log, any reseller or solution provider in the storage and backup business should be familiar with, or at least have heard of, EMC’s Retrospect backup and recovery software. The software is designed for SMB use and distributed enterprises. While these environments might not be as complex as enterprise settings, data protection is every bit as important. But because these environments likely don’t have extensive internal IT staffs, and thus aren’t equipped to run complex backup and recovery applications, EMC Retrospect is designed to make managing backups as simple and as automated as possible.

So that small businesses can take advantage of storage offerings with a relatively low price-to-capacity ratio, Infrant Technologies aims to turn the storage market around with its new axiom, “big is small,” and its new ReadyNAS NV NAS box.

CRN Test Center engineers put to the test two new and improved storage appliances.

Spectra Logic’s Spectra T50 Tape Library, which is easy to use, manage and maintain, makes backing up critical data as easy as possible.

New modules of the AppIQ StorageAuthority Suite R4.0 extends management capabilities to all NetApp storage solutions.

CRT displays didn’t lend themselves well to all-in-one system designs, but flat-panel displays are perfect for them.

With its 10-terabyte native capacity, Sony’s new CSM-20 SAIT-1 Mini Library is an ideal solution for the SMB sector.

LiveVault InSync is an outsourcing service that completely removes tape from the data protection equation and deploys the newest disk-to-disk technologies to ensure a successful backup and fast restore.

Solution providers waste time when cobbling together a storage solution using various bits of hardware and software from multiple vendors. A much faster way to solve storage problems is to go with a turnkey solution. With the recent proliferation of NAS and storage appliances based on Microsoft's Windows Storage Server 2003, resellers can simply shop for the exact solution they need.

No matter the size of a business' data flow, business-critical information needs to be backed up and protected at all costs. Synology offers the DS-101 DiskStation, a barebones file server system that caters to the SMB market, for less than $250.

Optical storage solutions are quickly outpacing the growth of other removable storage technologies such as floppy disks and removable hard-drive technologies.

GSA-5160D External 16x Super Multi optical burner drive

Exabyte's Magnum 1x7 Tape Autoloader is ideal for IT managers who require robust features usually only found in higher-end products.

Exabyte's Magnum 1x7 Tape Autoloader is a 2U, rack-mountable automated tape backup solution. The LTO-2 device is ideal for IT managers who require robust features usually found only in higher-end products.

Quantum DLT VS160, a tabletop, half-high form-factor tape drive that plugs the gap between entry-level tape drives and enterprise-level storage solutions.

Veritas' recent release of Backup Exec Suite 10 combines several of their backup products into a customizable package.

For small and midsize businesses, the widespread adoption of iSCSI was inevitable as capacity increased and prices fell. Offering adequate storage at a compelling price point, iSCSI has resulted in accelerated commoditization, lower costs and wider SAN adoption.

Linksys NSLU2 Network Storage Link quickly adds NAS capacity.

BAFO's External Hardware Drive Adds Extra Storage In Minutes.

Small to midsized businesses have vastly different backup and storage needs than enterprise-class organizations since the amount of data is usually smaller. Smaller companies usually don't have the same level of on-site technical expertise either. But regardless of a company's size--and however much or little data there is--data remains equally important to business-critical functions.

Glorio Makes Off-Site Backup Easy

IOMega is a well-known name in removable storage, and the company extends that expertise to DVD/CDR media with the Super DVD Writer. The device is an external, USB 2.0-based multi-format optical drive.

Tape has a reputation of being a reliable, portable and flexible method of backing up data. However, because it is difficult to recover data from tape backups, in addition to other weaknesses, the technology is gradually becoming the black sheep of the storage and backup industry.

While the jury is still out on the viability of tape backup, the technology continues to evolve. The simple fact is that tape backup is flexible, durable and portable and offers a significant savings in cost per Gigabyte.

Kanguru's Media X-Change 2.0 makes it easy to backup and secure flash memory content.

Kanguru Solutions' Media X-change 2.0 device makes it easy to back up and secure flash memory content.

EqualLogic's goal with its new PeerStorage Array 100E product was to make SANs more approachable and easier to use.